Swarm Robot Project with Open Source Design

Overview

The project aims to produce open source swarm robots that are fully autonomous with programmable and natural emergent behavior in a 20x28x15mm size only.

Details

A swarm of miniature robots has been built and developed the community portal for the Formica project as the robots work using biological algorithms to complete a task as a group while a collective swarm memory is exhibited. The robots are concurrently programmed using an inexpensive programming tool since the designs are completely open source. Formica is an extensible, hackable, low-cost, and open-source swarm robotics platform.

The principle behind the Formica project was that the number of robots in a swarm should be maximized by reducing complexity which also reduces cost of manufacturing. Because of budgetary constraints, this philosophy was initially settled and became an important feature of the swarm once a functioning swarm has been established. Since Formica is not a finished product, a bit of hacking and development can still be done. It simply needs soldering the motors, a few through-hole components, and a battery to be operational.

A MSPGCC is required to be installed in the system in order to build the Formica firmware.